The Voyage of the Sable Keech s-2

by Neal Asher

  ‘Remember the hooder? Did you see any ECS monitors afterwards, any of the Warden’s drones? Bloc’s Kladites are armed now, and they will enforce Bloc’s law only.’

  ‘I guess that’s true.’

  Styx continued relentlessly, ‘When you live in a society governed by uncompromising law, it is a mistake often made to think you somehow carry it with you when you step outside the safe confines of that society.’

  Bloc turned up his volume again and bellowed for silence. When he finally got it, he eyed the various rifts developing in the crowd.

  ‘Obviously there are some issues that need addressing,’ he continued, ignoring a muttered ‘Fucking right’ from Ellanc.

  He went on, ‘I will arrange some meetings so that you may present your complaints in an orderly manner. You will be notified about them through your cabin screens. Now, this is a ship upon which a crew needs to work, so your presence on the decks does not help them. If you would all please return to your cabins, you will duly be notified.’

  But the crowd did not clear. The complaining started up again. Bloc retreated, but they followed him across the quarter deck and down beside the stern deckhouse. There, Aesop and Bones suddenly turned on them, while the four Kladites shepherded Bloc away. Some pushing and shoving ensued, only to result in Bloc’s two companions hurling Ellanc Strone and a couple of others to the deck.

  ‘You should be careful,’ Aesop said evenly to the prostrate figures. ‘You might accidentally have gone over the side, and then the weight of your internal hardware would have taken you right down.’

  None of the crowd subsequently tried to follow Bloc.

  ‘Thus it begins,’ said Styx.

  * * * *

  Sturmbul was certainly impressed with the enormous ship, but as a Hooper nearing his three hundredth year he had not survived by trusting other people’s workmanship, and as a shipwright himself, employed by Bloc, he had wanted for many days to make a closer inspection of the vessel. On the day of its launch he had watched the stair fold up into the side of the ship, and that section of hull close after they brought that woman aboard. He then wandered over to a Hooper who was standing idly by, watching the massive midship anchor chains being hauled up

  ‘That chain ain’t greased,’ he observed.

  The other Hooper turned to him. ‘The top few links are automatically sprayed with Nilfrict as the anchor goes down and hits the bottom. All morning I’ve been watching frog whelks scrabbling for a grip and falling off.’

  ‘They could come up with the rest of the chain,’ suggested Sturmbul.

  The other Hooper just pointed, and Sturmbul went over for a closer inspection. The chain was crashing up through a funnel-ended hole in the upper section of hull, up through the deck over ceramal reels, around a motorized capstan, then down into a chain locker. He watched a hammer whelk ascend gripping the chain and go into that funnel. A wet squeaking squelch ensued, and as the chain emerged up over the reels it was thick with ichor and broken shell.

  ‘Ah,’ said Sturmbul, turning to the other man. ‘What’s your job?’

  ‘Anchorman. Buggered if I know why. All they do is flick a touch panel up there.’ He stabbed a thumb towards the bridge.

  Sturmbul shrugged.

  Over the ensuing day he encountered a lot of the same: Hoopers standing around gazing with bemusement at all the machines doing their jobs for them. However, the same did not apply to him. He spent time studying the plans on his cabin screen, making occasional forays to check this or that. Half a day he spent replacing some pulleys the Golem sail had ripped out of their fittings. Then he took a further half-day reorganizing the machinery and spares on the maintenance deck. But now he was finally free to look around.

  Standing on the main deck, he looked up when shadows slid across the midship deckhouse and he observed some fabric sails reefing with automated precision, and the Golem sail on Mainmast Two turning its rig to the wind. For such a huge vessel, this ship moved very smoothly. Sturmbul found it almost too smooth, but understood the Sable Keech would not be tossed about much in seas like these. He headed for the stairwell of Mizzen One.

  The stair took him down ahead of the crew quarters, through a section that was open with gantries either side. The decks below were similarly open down to the bilge, to give access for the crane above. He departed the stair on B Deck, strolling along a corridor between the reifications’ staterooms, and could not help slowing his pace to peer in through an open door. Inside he observed a dead woman swabbing her shrivelled breasts with a sponge soaked in blue balm, felt slightly sickened by the sight and quickly moved on before she spotted him. Then, encountering a squad of four armed Kladites marching down the corridor, he stood aside and eyed them suspiciously.

  Reaching the third mainmast, Sturmbul took the spiral stair down to the maintenance deck. Here, he had been told, was stored every conceivable component that might be required, barring an entire new ship, of course. He sniffed the familiar smell of newly cut wood and glanced back through a wide sliding bulkhead door, beyond which were stored stocks of planking, beams, sheet bubble-metal, and some of the ship’s larger components, on either side of a wide gangway supplied with rails and pallets for shifting those heavier materials. Further beyond lay the open section through which larger items could be craned up above. Ahead of him were machine shops where they could make new items: cutting and shaping wood and metal into the most minuscule item if necessary. He waved at Lumor and Joss, who were joyously shoving a lump of wood into a robotic router and tapping things into the machine’s console. The misshapen object coming out of the other end appeared utterly useless, and it was obvious the two were playing around, but he thought it better not to berate them just yet. He glimpsed, in partitioned booths, the planers, lathes, mills and other machines less familiar to him as he moved on.

  The next bulkheads, sectioning off the stair of Mainmast Two, led through to a storeroom containing smaller items. Cages were filled with a shipwright’s cornucopia; one was packed full of monofabric. Boxes contained metal and wooden fixings; other items rested on long racks, all clearly labelled: cablemotor mizzen staysail 1B, pulley—standard, cable clamp… the list went on and on. Yet more racks contained components for the cabins: taps, sinks, light panels and other electrical fittings. He moved past these, and spotted Rymund standing before a cage containing a miscellany of bottles and cans.

  ‘All right, Rymund?’

  ‘Just seeing what we got here, Sturm.’

  Sturmbul glanced at the notescreen in Rymund’s hand. ‘And what we got?’

  ‘Seagourd resin, paints, greases and oils—all the usual—but we’ve got glues that could stick a giant leech to the Big Flint, also solvents and acids and a shitload of other stuff I’m still trying to figure. Here, wood metalizer—you got a rotten beam all you do is soak it in this stuff and a few minutes later it’s full of a steel fibre grid.’

  ‘You got a rotten beam,’ said Sturmbul huffily, ‘and you ain’t been doing your job right.’

  ‘Just what it says here.’

  Sturmbul snorted and moved on, entered the stair at Mainmast One, then at the next bulkhead pressed his hand against the panel beside the heavy door, which admitted him to a more secure area. He was allowed in here for inspection purposes, but was immediately aware of the swivel-mounted camera with its underslung laser. He eyed a locked cage containing QC hand lasers, some laser carbines and energy canisters. Just what was left—the rest of the armoury the Kladites carried constantly.

  Other open cages about him contained reification spares and medical equipment, and Sturmbul guessed they were stored here simply because there was space to spare. He moved further on through, the camera tracking him. It was a standard security camera: large enough to be seen and by its obvious presence prevent wrongdoing.

  The next door admitted him to an area containing two immense water tanks and a desalination plant—the latter an upright cylinder made of brushed aluminium. From this pipes punched do
wn through the deck, some of them eventually opening into the sea below. Other pipes connected to the water tanks, and a wider one exited sideways through the hull. He had already seen this last pipe spewing salt sludge waste as the plant filled the tanks with fresh water refined from the sea. He listened hard for the sound of pumps, but heard none. This was Polity technology: if it made any noise, that meant something was going wrong.

  Rather than now go on to the less interesting chain lockers, Sturmbul climbed down a ladder into the misnamed bilge. This area rose three decks in height, with partial decks and enclosed areas scattered all around it. There were many items and mechanisms here that he could only guess about. Fat cylindrical bubble-metal shrouds he felt sure concealed Polity technology. Similar, though larger, shrouds covered something far back in the stern, where in any other ship the engines might be positioned. He guessed what lay hidden there was not something Bloc or Lineworld Developments would want Windcheater to know about. On a railed deck directly opposite him, he observed racks of laminar storage batteries which connected to solar panels up in the rigging, and thereby fed all the electrical systems of the ship. Along with them, also connected into the system, were a couple of squat, sealed chrome cylinders. No one had told him what these were for, but the fact that they required a pure water feed from the desalination plant above led him to suspect they were fusion plants. A section of the bilge, at midships, was utterly sealed off. He guessed that was where they kept the submersible no one was supposed to know about. But there were many other things here of which he knew nothing: many concealed machines, hidden corridors, strange nooks and sealed compartments.

  He stepped off the ladder and walked across the gratings, eyeing the lower hull and the massive keel, confirming for himself that this place was misnamed, for the bilge contained not a single drop of sea water. He moved forward along aisles, checking corridors, finding his way to the hull wherever he could and rapping it with his knuckles. Nearer the bows, below the chain lockers, he almost got lost in the twists and turns, odd corridors, ladders and different levels rising amid concealed machines. When he heard a sound of chains, he wondered what had gone wrong. Why were they dropping the anchor again? But the sound was not from the locker above, but nearby.

  He turned towards it and died.

  Eventually.

  * * * *

  The leech was coiled up like a giant slug poisoned by a huge slug pellet. Captain Ambel inspected it while behind him Peck pumped a cartridge into his shotgun’s breech and eyed the surrounding sea. Deep wounds had been burnt into the creature’s front end—not injuries it might naturally have received in the depths. The Captain walked down alongside the length of this hill of slimy flesh, slapping the flat of the machete blade against his leg. When he reached what he considered the correct position on its body, he stabbed the machete in and drew it across for three metres, like opening a zip. The purple and yellow lips of the cut everted under pressure from inside, but the spill of ichor was thick and sluggish. He reached out and touched the raw flesh. It was cool. The leech had been dead for at least a day. Nodding to himself, he chopped downwards at one end of the long slash, and more inner flesh bulged out. When he then sliced down from the other end, a great meaty flap peeled down and the edge of the leech’s translucent intestinal sac bulged out, packed with unidentifiable lumps. He sliced across this, and quickly stepped back as dissolving chunks of heirodont flesh avalanched out, before being blocked by something larger. The half-digested head of a small molly carp oozed into view, tatters of translucent flesh clinging to its skull, its eyes gone and the jagged teeth in its mouth revealed dripping and gleaming. Another hack, and the carp slid out over the stinking mass and flopped over on the grey sand.

  ‘Greedy bugger,’ Peck observed.

  Ambel stepped around the mess and peered into the rapidly collapsing cavity.

  ‘Further back,’ he muttered, then cut open another three-metre flap. This time the stuff that emerged was less easily identifiable. Certainly it included undigested sections of glister shell and what looked like a load of rotten apples, which it took him a moment to identify as probably a whole shoal of boxies. The rest was just meat fibres, bones and dilute green bile.

  ‘Here we go!’

  Ambel cut his way in, scooping aside the garbage with his machete, careful not to get any of the bile on himself. Eventually he revealed a large baggy organ the size and shape of a potato sack, fringed with wet combs of white flesh. Pulling some string from his pocket he tied off the intestinal tube leading from it to the main gut, cut that.. then cut around the organ until he could pull it free. It dropped and slid out, and he dragged it down to the sea to wash it off. There were boxies nosing about in the shallows, but the moment spilled bile washed off the bile duct and clouded the water, they shot away. Ambel could feel a slight tingling in his hands and a hollowness in his stomach, of either hunger or nausea. This had happened to him before: the slightest contact with leech bile—from which sprine could be refined—poisoning some of the viral fibres in his body. It would not kill him, since only swallowing the stuff could do that, though it could make him feel unwell.

  ‘A good un,’ he said, hauling the duct up out of the sea by its tied-off tube. Then he noticed Peck peering into the slimy cavity, his expression puzzled. Still carrying the duct, he walked up to stand beside the other man. ‘What’s up?’

  Peck gestured with his shotgun. ‘What’s that bugger?’

  Lying in the base of the cavity was a segmented silver sphere the size of a cricket ball. As they watched it opened out, like a pill-bug without legs, began emitting a low hum and rose up into the air, turning so it pointed towards Ambel and Peck. The two stepped back.

  Peck aimed his shotgun, but Ambel reached out and pushed the barrel down.

  ‘It’ll be gone in a sec,’ said the Old Captain.

  The object floated out into the open air, turned towards the sea, then abruptly shot away. In moments it was out of sight.

  In response to Peck’s querying look, Ambel said, ‘Warden stuff. Likes to know where all the adult leeches are, and who’s getting hold of the sprine.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Peck. ‘Like mebbe hornets.’

  ‘Yes, certainly them,’ Ambel agreed.

  As they headed back towards the Treader, Ambel glanced across to where the others were raking amberclams out of the sand. Really it was meat like that they most needed, but he had been unable to resist the lure of a bile duct obtainable without having to harpoon a living leech and cut it open out at sea.

  ‘Gettin’ some local activity now,’ announced Peck.

  Ambel glanced back to see a rhinoworm rearing out of the sea, ten metres behind the beached leech—and other disturbances in the water to either side of it. He had observed this sort of thing before. It was as if the local fauna sensed the most poisonous part of the leech had been removed and that now it was time to feed. Often, seeing activity of this kind—the curious behaviour of molly carp, the awareness of danger in some whelks—Ambel wondered about the intelligence of some of the creatures here. The sails were obviously intelligent, but other Spatterjay animals definitely reacted in ways that were noticeably… odd.

  Back at the ship, Boris threw him a rope, which he then tied to the bile duct.

  ‘Stow it carefully,’ said Ambel, as Boris hauled the organ aboard.

  Ambel and Peck then returned to join Anne and the others. There was a stink in the air of the dried fish flakes scattered over the wet sand to lure up the molluscs. The juniors were now raking up the big amber-lipped white clams, while Anne and Sild collected them in riddles, washing them off in a nearby pool, and filled sacks with them.

  ‘Wonder if there’ll be any pearls?’ Peck was watching Ambel.

  Almost unconsciously Ambel patted his pocket where he kept the only pearl he had ever extracted from a clam. Peck was wise to his trick of seemingly discovering this same pearl just prior to some dangerous venture—a sign of good luck. Ambel glanced back at the leec
h. Two rhinoworms were now arced up over the rear of it, like pink question marks, turning their rhinoceros heads from side to side as if trying to figure out what might have happened to it. Their behaviour was similar to vultures approaching the corpse of a lion: aware that here was available meat, but cautious of the possibility that it might still have some life in it. Then one of them plunged down, bit deep, thrashed from side to side, and tore off a chunk of brown and purple flesh. Ambel decided there was little time for play-acting when, over to one side, a single prill splashed up on the beach, and behind it sharp cones rose like teeth emerging from the waves as a flock of frog whelks came marching in.

  ‘That’ll be enough, Anne,’ he decided. ‘We’ll have more company soon.’

  The juniors stopped raking to help collect the clams already raked to the surface, and soon they were all trudging back to the ship, laden with their booty. With two heavy sacks gripped in each hand, Ambel kept an eye on the host gathering around the huge leech corpse. Something there focused his attention. One of the rhinoworms appeared to have gone, which surprised him as, with such bounty available, the creature should not have left until utterly bloated. He kept glancing back, then saw the second worm being wrenched back down under the waves, disappearing like a lead bar dropped end-on into the water.

  ‘Looks like a molly carp just arrived,’ remarked Anne, also having witnessed this.

  Ambel wondered. It would have to be a very big and powerful carp to drag a rhinoworm down that hard, so surely they should see some disturbance in the sea there. There was none.

  ‘Pick your feet up, lads,’ he said calmly.

  Prill and frog whelks were now swarming over the massive corpse, like flies on a turd. Suddenly the body jerked. The prill still clung on with their sickle legs embedded in slimy flesh, but frog whelks were bounding away in every direction. A large flat tentacle rose up out of the sea, hovered like a cobra, then slammed down on the leech to get a better grip.